With the proliferation of high quality video, an increasing number of electronics devices (e.g., consumer electronics devices) utilize high-definition (HD) video, which has an overall data throughput requirement on the order of multiple Gbps. In most wireless communications, HD video is compressed first before transmission over a wireless medium. Compression of the HD video is attractive because the overall required communication bandwidth and power can be significantly reduced, relative to transmission of the original, uncompressed video. However, with each compression and subsequent decompression of the video, some video information can be lost and the picture quality is degraded. Furthermore, compression and decompression of the video signal incurs significant hardware cost.
It is desirable to transmit uncompressed HD video in certain scenarios. The High-Definition Multimedia Interface (HDMI) specification defines an interface for uncompressed HD transmission between devices through HDMI cables (wired links). Three separate channels are used to transmit three pixel component streams (e.g., R, B, G). For each channel, pixels are transmitted in a pixel-by-pixel order for each video line and line-by-line for each video frame or field. The HDMI provides pixel-repetition functionality which repeats each pixel one or multiple times. Copies of each pixel directly follow the original pixel during the transmission at each pixel component channel.
However, existing Wireless Local Area Networks (WLANs) and similar technologies do not have the bandwidth needed to support uncompressed HD video. Further, existing wireless networks may suffer from undesirable interference originated from nearby/neighboring devices, either in the same network or in other networks. As such, new frequency bands are needed for transmission of uncompressed HD video over wireless channels.
Further, forward error correction (FEC) codes are widely used in wireless communication systems for error protection and allow correction of bit errors due to noise, channel fading as well as other system imperfections. Normally, all information bits have equal importance and are thus equally protected. However, for communication of uncompressed video, the information bits have different levels of priority in terms of importance of visual information they represent. Losing higher priority bits in transmission, results in more visual degradation than lower priority bits. There is, therefore, a need for a method and a system for efficient, reliable transmission of uncompressed HD video wirelessly.